IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: All hands on deck (if not the corporate media!) for the largest climate rally in U.S. history... but is President Obama all talk and no action?; Secret memo reveals tar sands are poisoning Alberta, Canada; PLUS: Mayor Bloomberg's big plans to greenify NYC ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

But television newscasts made just passing references to what the activists were calling the biggest climate change action in many years, perhaps ever. It was not mentioned on any of the Sunday chat shows.

It’s a moral referendum on our willingness to do the simplest thing we must do to avert catastrophic climate disruption: Stop making it worse. Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that “locks in” dangerous emission levels for many decades. Keystone is a both a conspicuous example of that kind of investment and a powerful symbol for the whole damned category... [T]o not speak out against this pipeline is to concede defeat.

“Part of my job is to use the bully pulpit to help raise people’s awareness, because if the public cares about it, eventually Congress acts. If the public doesn’t care about it, it’s very hard to get big stuff done because legislators respond to their constituents sooner or later.”

Tailings ponds from oilsands production are leaking and contaminating Alberta’s groundwater, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was told in an internal memo obtained by Postmedia News... in new research that rejected longstanding claims that toxins in the region of the Athabasca River were coming from natural sources.

"To make New York even more environmentally-friendly, during the year ahead we’ll encourage use of electric vehicles by installing curbside battery chargers at sites throughout the city. ... push for a local law banning the Styrofoam food packaging that chokes solid waste landfills...we’ll also begin recycling food waste."

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

BP announced Tuesday that it would defend itself in court against “excessive” claims for civilian penalties and federal gross negligence charges regarding its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The federal government is facing significant financial risks related to extreme weather events, and states and cities can no longer depend on it for extra help after such events occur, the Republican chairman of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said Friday.

Parts of the Middle East are losing groundwater reserves at “an alarming rate,” according to a new analysis of NASA satellite data.From the beginning to 2003 to the end of 2009, portions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria that lie within the Tigris and Euphrates river basins shed 117 million acre-feet of water. That’s roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.

[T]he answer lies in atmospheric physics. A warmer atmosphere can hold, and dump, more moisture, snow experts say. And two soon-to-be-published studies demonstrate how there can be more giant blizzards yet less snow overall each year. Projections are that that’s likely to continue with manmade global warming.

Air pollution causes heart attacks and death. Especially when the pollutants include ozone and particulate matter. And more often in the summer time, when ozone levels are higher.... Air pollution is of particular concern in Houston, which is home to the nation’s biggest petrochemical refining complex

Last year's drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.

Federal charges are expected to be filed today against an oil and natural gas drilling company accused of dumping more than 20,000 gallons of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River on Jan. 31, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach.

[T]he state Department of Health’s Bureau of Laboratories ...[disclosed] last November that department scientists had omitted data on some toxic metals found in water taken from a site in southwestern Pennsylvania.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he intends to use his final year in office to push for more recycling and electric vehicles, a curbside food-composting pilot program and a ban on plastic-foam food packaging.

Two top officials of the East Orange Water Commission have been charged with conspiring to close contaminated wells before monthly water tests so as to falsely report low levels of a regulated contaminant in drinking water supplied to customers, then opening the wells, allowing the chemical back into the water supply.

The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.

Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.

Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.

Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.

It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

Davey - that's not really an 'alternate view'. The author of that post, a meteorologist (not an 'expert'), is criticizing the AP reporter, rather than the two upcoming studies in the article, which haven't been published yet. Those studies were done by actual atmospheric scientists. Maybe the meteorologist will submit his critique for peer review, as the actual atmospheric scientists who did the actual work on those two studies have done, and see how it stands up to the same scrutiny.

The five most devastating typhoons recorded in the Philippines have occurred since 1990, affecting 23 million people. Four of the costliest typhoons anywhere occurred in same period, according to an Oxfam report. What is more, Bopha hit an area where typhoons are all but unknown.

The inter-governmental panel on climate change says mean temperatures in the Philippines are rising by 0.14C per decade. Since the 1980s, there has been an increase in annual mean rainfall. Yet two of the severest droughts ever recorded occurred in 1991-92 and 1997-98.

Scientists are also registering steadily rising sea levels around the Philippines, and a falling water table. All this appears to increase the likelihood and incidence of extreme weather events while adversely affecting food production and yields through land erosion and degradation, analysts say.

I'll look forward to your response --- to all of the data supplied by those scientific, corroborated, peer-reviewed findings from a number of different sources --- that will no doubt be a link to the discredited Anthony Watts! Thanks!

1. Since you slapped WUWT with an ad. hom, I donated $100 to him this morning! If you take a look at the data on AW sea Ice page, you can see that he does not attempt to hide the fact that sea ice extent, total ice, sea ice area, sea ice anomaly...is decreasing in the 30 yr span.

2. I will agree that between 1979 and 2013 various measures indicate a reduction in arctic sea ice. According to Schweiger, the 80% number is based on a model (PIOMAS) using the data from CryoSat-2, inter alia, which has been operating (three years this April). Here is what Schweiger said:

“The reanalysis relies on a model, so some people have, justifiably, questioned it,” Schweiger said. “These data essentially confirm that in the last few years, for which we haven’t really had data, the observations are very close to what we see in the model. So that increases our confidence for the overall time series from 1979 to the present.”

3. What is the correct amount of sea ice? What would gaia like to see? While you are at it, please tell me what the correct temperature of gaia should be? As you can see from one of the links above, the Arctic has been ice free during periods in the summer for over a thousand years.

4. 30 yrs in proportion to geologic time is...well, you do the math...no let me help 6E-9

5. I take issue with the use of "accelerating" in the Forbes article. What does it mean? Look at data between 1981 to 1987...that is accelerating as well but in the other direction.

6. It is interesting to me that there appears to be a systematic offset in these data starting when CryoSat started reporting. I am going out on a limb here, but I suspect we will see a correction after a few more years of data. Certainly this may not change the slope but it may put this "accelerating" issue to bed.

CryoSat-2 measures ice volume using a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar altimeter, which fires pulses of microwave energy down towards the ice. The energy bounces off both the top of sections of ice and the water in the cracks in between. The difference in height between these two surfaces let scientists calculate the freeboard – the height of ice above the water – and then the volume of the ice.

The findings are the result of a huge international collaboration between teams from UCL, the European Space Agency, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Washington, York University, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Morgan State University and the University of Maryland.

The team confirmed CryoSat-2 estimates of ice volume using measurements from three independent sources – aircraft, moorings, and NASA's Operation IceBridge.
...
The sharp drop in Arctic sea ice area has been matched by a harder-to-see, but equally sharp, drop in sea ice thickness. The combined result has been a collapse in total sea ice volume — to one fifth of its level in 1980.

Yes, I read up on CryoSat this morning as well as all of those other data they used to assemble the results reported. Overall, it looks like solid work except that I have deep suspicions about 'models.' Give the Sat some more fly time and lets see if the results continue to comport with the model. I believe the 80% number comes from the model because CryoSat has only been taking data since 2010.

I think this sums up Davey's approach to the uncomfortable implications of climate science and current observations:

"I am not to blame"

That seems to be the primary motivation underlying all the unpaid, non-professional, non-scientist climate change "skeptics" and "deniers" that I see around the internets.

It's an understandable response to the uncomfortable implications of climate science, which, it must be emphasized, is the consensus among the global professional scientific community.

Davey, it's not an ad hominem attack to point out the debunkings of Watts' site by actual climate scientists. Surely you are aware of them? As flawed human beings, we are all susceptible to "motivated reasoning" and "confirmation bias", seeking out evidence that confirms our opinions.

The good thing about science is that it exists independently of our opinions. While there is uncertainty about the exact timing and magnitude of the impacts of burning eons of sequestered carbon and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, there is no doubt of the physics and chemistry involved, at least among the professionals who actually have the training and education to evaluate the data, who say it is not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when" and "how much."

You can quibble about this study or that model, but in the end, opinions are irrelevant. As I have said before, such an approach fails on both risk management and on values.

It's interesting to ponder why anyone would want to cling to the idea that there will be no consequences to carbon-loading the atmosphere over mere decades, when the evidence continues to point solidly in one direction, and one direction only.

The world is going to turn on Oil-Qaeda and it is not going to be pretty, in fact, it is going to be pitch fork ugly.

Today, Oil-Qaeda is killing 5-6 million people a year, causing unfathomable property damage around the world, and still deceiving people like Davey.

Davey is absolutely not to blame, and neither is the public.

I watch Oil-Qaeda very closely, and this is the guilt trip they are trying to hang on us: "We the public desperately want their oil, and as good peddlers they have to sell it to us. We made them do it."